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In the course of his long career, Leon Panetta was a lieutenant in the Army, a congressman from California, Bill Clinton’s White House chief of staff, Barack Obama’s director of the C.I.A., and later, his Secretary of Defense. David Remnick talks with Panetta about the current Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, the legality of the ongoing Navy strikes targeting civilian boats off the coast of Venezuela, and the problem with using the military as “the President’s personal toy.”

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

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Gabrielle Calvocoressi’s most recent collection, “The New Economy,” was a finalist for the 2025 National Book Award for Poetry, and one of their poems was included in “A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker,” an anthology volume published this year on the occasion of the publication’s hundredth anniversary. The magazine’s poetry editor, Kevin Young, spoke with Calvocoressi about their creative process, how poetry can help with grief, and the inspirations behind their work.

This segment mentions suicide and suicidal thoughts. If you are having thoughts of suicide, call or text 988 or chat at 988Lifeline.org.

New episodes of The New Yorker Radio Hour drop every Tuesday and Friday. Follow the show wherever you get your podcasts.

The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

For a time, I lived in a little town in upstate New York. The point was to “get away,” even though I didn't know what I was getting away from. Sometimes, to relieve myself from the boredom of my own words—I was trying to write—I’d take a walk in the village; I especially liked to stop at a store where I once bought a beautiful big light bulb. The store was like an old curiosity shop, and I liked being enveloped by its warmth. Later, I learned that it was operated by the artist Nancy Shaver, and suddenly everything made sense: the small space was curated with a discerning eye. It’s that eye—the uniqueness of it—that you’ll see in Shaver’s jewel of a show, “Bus Stop” (at the Derek Eller gallery, through Jan. 10). It’s a show about squares—how, when they are assembled in interesting ways, they can yield different emotional landscapes. But Shaver’s squares, composed of wooden blocks and fabric, or paper and acrylic, have a rigor that doesn’t invite comparison with anything but themselves. She’s no Mondrian, she’s a Shaver, and, as such, has her own idea about form, which, despite her interest in the grid, isn’t tight: her colors and ideas jump out at you with the force of the best abstraction. One witty piece, “Fruit Box,” for instance, encases blocks in various shades of blue and orange in a looser but no less intentional display—it’s Shaver taking Joseph Cornell for a spin, and coming out on the other side as less romantic, certainly, but no less joyful about how form itself tells its own story.

“The Wall Project,” from 2022-25.Art work by Nancy Shaver / Courtesy Derek Eller gallery; Photograph by Adam Reich

Earlier in her career, Shaver made different work and, over at the elegant American Art Catalogues gallery and publisher, a three-part show will display some examples of Shaver’s pictures made in the nineteen-seventies that are a very nice complement to the work at Derek Eller. (Some block pieces are at the American Art Catalogues as well). Curated with sensitivity and finesse by the artist Jared Buckhiester and the gallerist Grant Schofield, the gelatin-silver prints—one nicely cropped picture is from a Sears catalogue—belong in spirit to the Pictures Generation, a group of artists, including Cindy Sherman and Robert Longo, who were responding to Watergate fatigue and a world defined by image-making. (MTV was just around the corner.) But Shaver’s images are more inward, and so delicate in their evocation of themselves—the picture’s the thing—that they gather like beautiful vapors in your head and stay there, like a weather front you can’t forget.—Hilton Als

For those without family to see—or with family who don’t want to see them—the holidays can be a drag. Cue the pencil-mustached entertainer Murray Hill, who created a Christmas variety show for this subpopulation in New York City twenty-five years ago. Since then, “A Murray Little Christmas” has found a wider audience, as has Hill in other endeavors, including a role on HBO’s “Somebody Somewhere.” That show’s stars, Bridget Everett and Jeff Hiller, performed at last December’s iteration; this year, expect more celebrity guests, holiday songs backed by an eleven-piece band, and a choir or two, with Hill’s risqué humor and warmth stringing everything together. Suggested attire: festive, fancy, or, for those on the naughty list, furry suits.—Dan Stahl (Alice Tully Hall; Dec. 19-20.)

For the past fifteen years, the Detroit band Protomartyr has established itself as a standard-bearer of noise and post-punk. The group took up their mantle when front man Joe Casey joined the already-paired guitarist Greg Ahee, bassist Scott Davidson, and drummer Alex Leonard, and the quartet harnessed a whirlwind Motor City sound on their albums “No Passion All Technique” (2012) and “Under Color of Official Right” (2014). Planted firmly at the center of the band’s maelstrom appeal was “The Agent Intellect,” a dynamic album from 2015 that stretched a mystifying and blistering songcraft to its breaking point, moored by Casey’s arcane lyrics and lurching baritone. This show commemorates that defining LP’s tenth anniversary; the record has only grown more urgent with time.—Sheldon Pearce (Warsaw; Dec. 19.)

The cast of “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”Photograph by Joan Marcus

“Phylactery”: a small box containing Hebrew texts sometimes worn by Jewish men during prayers. It’s also one of the fiendishly difficult words given to contestants in “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,” now getting its first N.Y.C. production since a Tony-winning Broadway run from 2005 to 2008. The revival has been updated with occasional topical references, but its power derives from the innately dramatic contest structure, so ingeniously developed by the late composer William Finn and the book writer Rachel Sheinkin that each elimination comes as a surprise. The characters, such as the self-important, mucosal William Barfée (Kevin McHale, of “Glee”), are as eclectic as the words they spell; the show’s greatest triumph is revealing the humanity behind their idiosyncrasies.—D.S. (New World Stages; through April 12.)

The choreographer Marla Phelan is interested in the birth of stars—not Barbra Streisand or Lady Gaga but the cosmic kind. Working with the astrophysicist Blakesley Burkhart, she has made “Birth + Carnage,” a dance production in which performers mimic the patterns of star formation and other celestial motion. The dancers’ bodies are influenced by gravity but also by human forms of attraction and repulsion. Constellating, colliding, and collapsing, they mirror a digital installation of astrophysical computer simulations, drawing emotional coloring from a score by James Newberry.—Brian Seibert (La MaMa; Dec. 19-21.)

Jamie Lee Curtis and Emma Mackey in “Ella McCay.”Photograph by Claire Folger / Courtesy © 2025 20th Century Studios

With “Ella McCay,” James L. Brooks, a longtime rom-com champion, directs his first feature film in fifteen years. In some ways, it’s a blatant throwback, but, in others, an acrid tweak of the genre. The action is set mainly in 2008, when Ella (played by Emma Mackey), a thirty-four-year-old policy wonk who is her unnamed state’s lieutenant governor, ascends to the governorship. Then her private life goes haywire: her estranged father (Woody Harrelson) shows up, and her husband (Jack Lowden) feels neglected. Flashbacks to Ella’s adolescence set up her dilemmas; despite the heartwarming story that’s revealed, this is an anti-romantic comedy of failed males and the trouble they cause. Brooks gazes hopefully at a new generation of self-unsure men whose acceptance of weakness is their strength; as for Ella, she’s merely the movie’s figurehead. Jamie Lee Curtis plays Ella’s worldly-wise aunt.—Richard Brody (In wide release.)

Remember when you were eight years old, climbing trees, carrying your bike up with you, and then pedalling off the school roof? Me neither. But such is the world of Rajiv Joseph’s “Gruesome Playground Injuries,” in which the dauntless Doug (“Succession” ’s Nicholas Braun) does exactly that, then meets Kayleen (two-time Tony winner Kara Young) in the school infirmary, where she’s recovering from a stomach ache. Subsequent scenes hop forward and backward in time, each centered on forms of harm: an eye blown out by a firecracker, thighs slit with a razor blade. The actors’ transformations to embody their shifting ages, abetted by Sarah Laux’s evocative costumes, are a tour de force, but neither they nor the queasy attempts at humor prevent the feeling of watching trauma porn.—D.S. (Lucille Lortel; through Dec. 28.)

By now, you’re probably tired of all that holiday music. It sounded great as you were clearing the dishes on Thanksgiving, but the mirth has begun to feel oppressive. Here are some alternative expressions of good will, cheer, and peace on Earth.

Jackson 5, “In Japan!”
A Christmas soul playlist that was on non-stop rotation eventually sent me down a Motown rabbit hole, reminding me of this live gem recorded in Osaka in 1973. It captures the Jacksons in a moment of transition—no longer the cherubs of “ABC”—and experimenting with a looser, funkier sound.

Mavis Staples.Photograph by Elizabeth De La Piedra

Mavis Staples, “Sad and Beautiful World”
This is one of the year’s most surprising albums, in which the eighty-six-year-old gospel legend covers everyone from Curtis Mayfield and Leonard Cohen to Frank Ocean and Sparklehorse. Lush and serene, with a spryness that makes you feel hope for what lies ahead.

Kim Chang-Wan, “An Essay with a Guitar”
There’s a scene in the Korean filmmaker Park Chan-wook’s deliriously grim “No Other Choice” set to Kim’s “Let’s Walk On,” a delicate, haunting piece of loner folk. Kim’s 1983 album is a sparse guy-and-guitar masterpiece, a slightly bummed soundtrack for looking out the window as the sun sets at 4:30 P.M.

Real Lies, “Summer Rain EP”
The London duo Real Lies make dance tunes that manage to feel epic and twee at the same time. They’ve been one of my favorite acts for more than a decade, and I admire how they never do things the easy way. Their latest single came out in November, yet it’s an amped-up celebration of bygone bliss called “Summer Rain.” It’s simply too soon to look forward to 2026. But I know that, when the time comes, I’ll still be nodding along to “Let the Lips Fall Where They May,” a breezy blast of New Order-esque pop.

P.S. Good stuff on the internet:

• How to buy less and feel smug about it
• Your life is not a plot
• A cozy eggplant-pasta recipe

In the summer, the actress Natasha Lyonne relayed an anecdote about the late director David Lynch, in which he told her that A.I. in the creative arts would soon be as ubiquitous and indispensable as the pencil. Lyonne, who happens to be the co-founder of an A.I. studio, seemed to be implying that the revered filmmaker had offered his approval to the same nihilistic and destructive technology that recently enabled President Donald Trump to imagine himself as a king in a fighter jet dropping payloads of diarrhea on the people he’s sworn to serve. But Lynch’s public statements about A.I., like his public statements about lots of things, mixed earnest, generalized optimism with dread. In an interview with Sight & Sound magazine in November, 2024, he said that, on the one hand, “the good side” of A.I. could be “important for moving forward in a beautiful way,” and, on the other, “if money is the bottom line, there’d be a lot of sadness, and despair and horror.” He added, “I’m hoping better times are coming.”

They were not. In January, amid the wildfires that ravaged Los Angeles, Lynch was evacuated from his home and died shortly thereafter, of complications from emphysema. Days later, on what would have been Lynch’s seventy-ninth birthday, Trump was inaugurated into his second term. This coincidence of timing meant that, in the outpouring of public grief following Lynch’s death, viewers were discovering or returning to his life’s work at the same time that they were sustaining the first avalanches of cruelty and engineered disaster which have characterized much of the second Trump Administration. As the ghastly year dragged on, these streams of art and life kept converging.

2025 in Review

New Yorker writers reflect on the year’s highs and lows.

If, for example, you sensed that your corner of the world was being run by a psychopath and a cabal of goons who enjoy nothing so much as tearing an immigrant mother away from her child, your impressions would be reflected in “Blue Velvet” (1986). If you were stunned by how many prominent citizens were linked to the trafficking and exploitation of teen-age girls, you might see flashes of prophecy in the original broadcast run of “Twin Peaks” (1990-91) and in the feature film “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me” (1992). If you recoiled at the unleashing of violent and arbitrary forces that destroy people’s lives, livelihoods, and vocations for sport, you could find a black-comic riff on such phenomena in “Mulholland Drive” (2001). And, if you read dystopia between the lines of Trump’s executive order launching the “Genesis Mission”—a “coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI‑accelerated innovation and discovery” upon a defenseless public—you might just hear Lynch’s inimitable voice in your ear, that congenial blare of perfectly flat vowels affirming your worst fears: “THERE’D BE A LOT OF SADNESS AND DESPAIR AND HORROR.”

Lynch’s films are often graphic in their depictions of violence and degradation, even as their characters and plots can be enigmatic and mutable. He was drawn to detective stories in which the principal investigators must not merely solve a mystery but accommodate themselves to a reality that is too terrible to be believed—or else repress or dissociate from that reality. BOB, the bogeyman who torments Laura Palmer in “Twin Peaks,” can be seen, in the words of the critic and film curator Dennis Lim, “as a projection of Laura’s, a defense against an unthinkable truth.” She is not the only one deflecting. “BOB is real,” Laura insists, seething, to her agoraphobic lover, Harold Smith, in “Fire Walk with Me,” but it’s unclear whether Harold believes her, or what he could do about it if he did. This dilemma played out again and again over the past year—pity, for one, the representative from Georgia, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the onetime QAnon zealot who always knew that BOB was real, until, it seems, she saw BOB’s true face, and promptly resigned from Congress.

The scalding potency of “Fire Walk with Me” derives from its compassion for Laura’s suffering and devastation, but also from its depiction of the sleepwalking complicity and learned helplessness that swirls around her. Everybody in Laura’s world kind of knows that something very bad is happening, and Laura kind of knows they know, and hardly anybody knows how to help or how to stop it, and isn’t it all a shame?

One of the awful strains of a frequently awful year was the apparent comfort that some of our nation’s most powerful men felt in openly value-ranking human beings, whether by dollar amount or nationality. Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, held a scaremongering press conference about autism in which he lamented “kids who will never pay taxes” and will “never hold a job.” The billionaire Elon Musk told Joe Rogan that the “fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy”—when this empathy is extended to people whom Musk views as undeserving, it can lead to “civilizational suicide,” he said. Vice-President J. D. Vance invoked the Catholic concept of ordo amoris to defend the Administration’s abhorrent immigration policies, inspiring a rebuke from Pope Francis just weeks before he died, in April. (“Christian love is not a concentric expansion of interests that little by little extend to other persons and groups,” Francis wrote, but, rather, “the love that builds a fraternity open to all, without exception.”) And, after President Trump announced a pause on all asylum decisions, Eric Schmitt, a Republican senator from Missouri, accused opponents of having “suicidal empathy” for refugees.

These refrains that Francis so forcefully rejected, with their currents of fascism and eugenics, are why the Lynch film that felt most resonant in the year of his death—and of Francis’s death—is about a person who has no “value.” The woefully deformed young man whose carnival nickname provides the title of “The Elephant Man” (1980) will never pay taxes or hold a job. He has no family—no place in Vance’s ordo amoris—and no vocation. In the late-Victorian-era London of the film’s setting, his only path to economic survival is through his own exploitation, either as a circus freak or a medical curiosity. He inevitably places burdens upon others, and he is difficult to share space with. He is, in short, a stress test for our belief in innate human dignity and the sanctity of life. Through the apocalyptic lens of 2025, a forty-five-year-old period piece seems reborn as a countercultural statement.

Loosely based on the short and blighted life of Joseph Merrick—called John Merrick in the film, and played by John Hurt—“The Elephant Man” was the most conventionally successful production of Lynch’s career, earning eight Oscar nominations and excellent box-office returns. I saw the movie on basic cable at some point in the early nineties, but, in the intervening decades, it’s become somewhat hard to find; the Criterion DVD and Blu-ray are out of print, and it’s not available to stream on commercial platforms or on Kanopy. (There is, for now, a good-enough upload on the Internet Archive, and a Janus Films / Criterion rerelease in the works.)

It is also perceived as Lynch’s least Lynch-y film, and with reason. It’s his only film set explicitly in the distant past, and much of the black-and-white imagery and mise-en-scène would not look out of place in an early Shepperton Studios feature. The story is clear and linear, pivoting on whether Merrick can find a safe and permanent home at the London Hospital, where the surgeon Frederick Treves (Anthony Hopkins) has brought him after his rescue from an abusive circus ringmaster (Freddie Jones), and where Merrick is secretly terrorized by a sadistic night porter (Michael Elphick). The production’s most crucial technical element was Hurt’s complex makeup and prosthetics, designed by Christopher Tucker; Lynch was also working alongside the legendary cinematographer Freddie Francis and a frankly outrageous roster of British actors, which also included Wendy Hiller and John Gielgud, the latter of whom played Hamlet in the West End long before Lynch was born. Under these blessed circumstances, any capable director could be expected to helm a very good film.

But “The Elephant Man,” on a belated second viewing, struck me as not merely a very good film but a perfect one, an overwhelming emotional experience, discordantly beautiful and transcendently sad—a pure distillation of its director’s sensibilities and a complete rejection of our ugly, fake, and barbarous moment. It foreshadows the unity of Lynch’s moral and aesthetic vision in the improbable parallels between Merrick, the hideous sideshow outcast, and Laura Palmer, the homecoming-queen Jeanne d’Arc who sits at the center of Lynch’s canon. Both characters are preyed upon at night; both keep their tormentors’ secrets, for reasons they and we don’t fully understand. Both take cues from paintings hanging on their bedroom walls when they decide (perhaps) to half surrender to their own deaths. In “The Elephant Man,” on the night that Merrick dies, he visits a London theatre to see a pantomime, where the delightful spectacle includes a winged fairy in a diaphanous white dress, floating above the stage on invisible wires. As he takes in the performance, he offers faint little nods of fondness and gratitude—tiny gestures, but they made me gasp, because Laura Palmer performs the same gestures in the final scene of “Fire Walk with Me,” when, after she is murdered, she glimpses an angel much like the one in her bedroom picture, levitating above her.

One of the thrills of Lynch’s work is in how he pushes ideas and feelings toward the edge of sentimental collapse without toppling over, and in how he sublimates words and images that might otherwise seem immovably hokey and clichéd. (A children’s pantomime? An angel?) Sometimes it is a matter of keeping a calm distance. In the film’s most famous scene, Merrick is cornered by a mob in Liverpool Street station and cries out, “I am not an animal! I am a human being!” Lynch does not heighten the moment with a closeup but instead shoots from behind Merrick’s pursuers. When Treves, who is renowned in London’s medical circles as Merrick’s savior, begins to feel qualms about the integrity of his motives, he asks his wife, “Am I a good man or a bad man?” With a lesser actor, this might sound laughably simplistic, but Hopkins underplays the line in a near-monotone, so that it sounds instead like existential desolation, articulated in the starkest terms.

I don’t entirely understand how Lynch achieves these vertiginous balances; the answer may lie beyond words or consciousness. In Hopkins’s recent memoir, “We Did O.K., Kid,” he invokes the scene in which Treves sees Merrick for the first time, in the cavernous space where the ringmaster hides him away between shows, and the camera moves in slowly on Treves as a single tear falls down his cheek. While filming the scene, Hopkins recalls, he stumbled over a step; he recovered and continued with the take, but the jolt, he writes, “sent something into my brain. It touched some core of terror that went back to childhood—the dark room, the shadow on the wall, the nightmare. I felt real fear of being in this pitch-black place. It was a supernatural feeling.” In recounting this story, Hopkins mentions Lynch only in passing, but the primal, possibly preverbal “core of terror” that the actor describes is the substrate of much of Lynch’s art—a landscape where the borders between nightmares and waking life are porous and largely irrelevant. This is, of course, the landscape where we all live now.

It may interest some of our reigning billionaires and politicians to know that “The Elephant Man” includes a brief, anguished debate between Treves and the London Hospital’s chairman, played by Gielgud, about whether anyone could truly imagine what Merrick’s life is like—if it is possible, in other words, to empathize with him, suicidally or otherwise. Lynch’s answer, I think, is no. His characters frequently dissociate or trade minds and identities with each other (“It’ll be just like in the movies—we’ll pretend to be someone else,” Betty Elms says in “Mulholland Drive”), but Lynch never asks his audience, implicitly or otherwise, to imagine “what it is like” to be John Merrick or Laura Palmer. He was not an empathic director but, rather, an uncommonly compassionate one. The word compassion comes from the Latin for “to suffer with”; it means to be present in another’s suffering, which is, in essence, the experience of watching “The Elephant Man.” The ending of “Fire Walk with Me” is shattering not because Lynch asks that you see the angel through Laura’s eyes, but that you see Laura watching the angel through your own.

In Catholic theology, to be present in another’s suffering is a means of breaking down false divisions between people. Love and community are inconceivable without compassion, and a void of compassion made possible the sadness, despair, and horror that shaped this past year. That void makes our humanity feel contingent, negotiable. Are you an animal or a human being? Am I a good man or a bad man? In the film, Lynch dissolves the scene before the question is resolved. Outside the film, no one who should ask is asking. ♦